Short Stories
I Am Held Against My ....
By M. Wilson
Sep 17, 2005, 4:20pm

How does Dell love me? Let me count the ways...

....(full fathom) FIVE catalogs in the last mail.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One day you too may be required to present yourself for questioning by a certain governmental body whose offices lie in an unremarkable building in West Mifflin. This arm (or phalange, maybe) of the gov’t looks after expenditures. Everyone’s expenditures. On everything. You have no idea what they actually bother to keep track of.
The first day I appeared, a receptionist pushed me through a door and locked it behind me. The room of inquisition lay shining before me. Its walls were brushed steel, and the entire room was round; it was like the housing of a jet engine. Three grand inquisitors in red robes made me stand against the wall, and chained me there.

I notice they ask only things you don’t want to tell. Your worst and best secrets. They had just one question for me at first: Why do you love him? They seemed to have knowledge of the dozens of letters I wrote but never sent you. They asked me this, and I stood for three hours with no answer.

Finally they bent their heads together and conferred. “The question is apparently a difficulty,” the head inquisitor said to me. “Instead, tell us this. What do you know about him?”

I told them, “He is a being entirely composed of the sweetest substance known on this planet.” They required elaboration. “The substance,” I said, fetching from far back in my memory, “has no name, really, but in most states is defined as a luxury item and is subject to a heavy excise tax. More enlightened cultures outside of the United States consider it necessary to maintain life and would not dream of taxing it. Its molecular makeup is a long, long string of carbons, making it – and him – something like honey, and something like diamonds… It is wildly expensive, of course. At the hotel buffet (they served two meals, I was there for seven hours) there was a glassful of it right in plain view in the ala carte section and no one had grabbed it yet. I wanted it but felt it couldn’t possibly be for me, it was too rich. Since I walked by, other people eventually grabbed it with greedy and ignorant hands. People who had no idea… You see, I am indecisive but not blind. I knew what it was precisely. And I still think about it.”

………

They released me for the weekend, but told me to return on Monday. So I walked around downtown. I went into the New Bank, hoping to visit my money. The Bank was frosty, gleaming. I went over to the foreign currency section. The bank officer there looked at me with hooded eyelids and remarked, “Yes – you certainly are foreign. One moment.” He opened drawers, and handed me brochures which explained the relationship of this Bank to the rest of the world. It was complicated. I was in a complicated bank.

The currency exchange was as follows: For each sentence I wrote I was to be kissed once, and twice for each paragraph. I would not be compensated for smaller fragments... The bank officer handed me a large white handkerchief and waited until I’d wiped off my lipstick. Leaning forward, he began kissing me; his taste was sharp and he smelled faintly of tobacco, but not unpleasantly so. He was very skilled, having worked here for years. I received full kiss after kiss until my head swam… But upon leaving the Bank, I felt that they might just as well have pressed cold coins against my mouth, repeatedly.

And all kisses have seemed like this, for some time.

I sat later in a coffeeshop, and stared at a map of a tropical island on the wall. It was like the island in me where I sent all those letters. Whatever was I thinking when I wrote those?

“Whatever are you thinking about?” A policeman in uniform asked me. He was at the next table. I looked at him helplessly.

“I’m missing someone,” I admitted.

“Missing someone? A missing person?” he asked, snapping to attention. “You must fill out form 240-G to report a missing person.” He was being very official. He handed me a paper. I took it.

A physical description, they wanted, on this form. I wrote: His eyes I believe are as blue as the eyes of the children of Mothra, those valiant caterpillars of the movie who swam all night across the sea to save Tokyo from destruction. His height is… he is as tall as he needs to be. His hair is grayish brown and straight and I dare not touch it for fear I would not stop.

The policeman grabbed the paper from me, since I was not giving useful information. They did not file this report. So I have heard nothing of you.

Logic

Back: Soon I was back against the wall with my inquisitors, who were losing patience already on a Monday morning.

“Why do you love him?” they railed at me.

I tried to say something. Couldn’t answer.

“You know nothing!” they exclaimed. “Nothing about him at all!”

“I don’t love him for his qualities,” I said. They immediately smiled. Like they’d caught me being stupid.

I said, “If I loved him for qualities he has, I guess that would be reasonable. But I don’t want to be reasonable. I don’t want to have just cause. That would be like giving love in return for good qualities, paying tit for tat, exchanging my love for his goodness… No, I wish to be entirely out of order. I don’t think love should be bartered, exchanged, agreed upon, contracted, paid for, traded, given in return, given fair market share, in fact I think it should be stolen. It should always be stolen, from now on.”

They grew pale and angry, and began hitting me with sticks. “Why do you love him!”

I spat: “Because I said so.” Which of course is the well-known Mammy Yokum Argument: Ah has spoken.

An inquisitor repeated sneerily, “Because you said so. Because you decided.” He gave me a whack that took the breath out of me, and shouted, "You're a monument to impertinence!"

Another leaned forward, studying me like I was an insect. “So you’re saying love is an act of will?”

I said, “Yes.”

Economics

An auditor came in a couple hours later, and I opened my eyes to see him sitting in front of me, holding a big ledger and frowning. “I’m looking over your accounts,” he said. “What have you spent most on?”

I considered. “Clairol products, probably.”

He threw his pen at me. “Not money, idiot – what have you spent the most time on?”

“Um,” I said, not wishing to elaborate.

He turned the book around and showed me the pages. In the book were photographs of my heart. Pictures so – raw, I could hardly look. With him looking on too, that is. It was like porn. The worst sort of fleshy structure bending and twisting around another, then some lacy arabesques that had become permanent, and one spot, a particularly saucy swelling, in which you were enfolded. The whole thing was structurally unsound; but all the best smut is. Eventually, after I cried and argued, he made me sign a promissory note with absolutely terrifying interest. I was definitely going to pay.

Logic, Again

They let me off the wall when evening came, so I went home. I thought about things, and decided I needed a new perspective. I found one.

My date that evening, a boastful man with a bald spot, arrived and informed me he could give me fifty orgasms that night. “Won’t that be something!” I exclaimed as he dragged me by the hand to his car.

“And did you?” my girlfriends asked the next day.

“Did I what?” I asked.

“Have fifty?”

“Oh, most likely,” I said. “I wasn’t paying strict attention.”

Also that morning a salesman came to the door and opened a suitcase which held, he told me, the finest and most powerful vacuum cleaner in the free world. I naturally ordered five. Then he told me about a bridge I could invest in. Gratitude filled me. “Send me a brochure right away,” I said.

My neighbor next door watched from her porch. “You’re crazy,” she told me.

“No, this is the way it’s got to be,” I said, making an important hand movement. “I am now accepting every assertion, every declaration, even if it seems impossible. Only if I believe all statements made to me am I in a position to apprehend the full truth in each one. For instance there are a couple things someone said to me once, and I need to understand them fully.”

My neighbor said, “What things?”

I held out fingers, counting, and quoted my mother: “ ‘I would go into a burning building for you,’… and ‘I love you more than life itself.’”

Later, during that morning’s session with my inquisitors, I told them all about my new perspective. They had a new perspective too. They sent me to jail.

..........

The Problem Seems to be Self-Indulgence

I wait drearily in my cell, relieved only by the once-daily outdoor exercises, until one day they tell me I have a visitor. It is Francis Bacon, in a proper hat and little Van Dyke beard. He lifts his nose walking in, and carefully lays a spotless white handkerchief on a chair before he sits on it. Regards me sternly.

I shuffle back a little. Oh, god. There is hentai all over the floor, and I try to shove it under my cot. Embarrassing. That’s how I got fat -- eating the stuff all day long. I ask Francis what he is doing here.

"I am here for illumination and enlightenment," he announces. "Yours, that is."

"Oh boy," I say, "here it comes."

He primly opened a book marked with a strip of velvet. The Bible? I wondered. He's going to read me Bible verses? But it turned out to be a book of his essays... I recognized the part he was reading. It was from the essay "On Love."

He read: "Amongst all the great and worthy persons (either ancient or recent) there is NOT ONE that hath been transported to the mad degree of Love; which just shows, doesn't it, that great spirits and great business do keep out of this weak passion."

"I know, I know," I groaned. "You're going to say, except for Marc Antony and Appius Claudius."

He nodded. "Antony was an intemperate man and an idiot besides, so no wonder. But Appius was austere and wise. And therefore it seems that sometimes Love can find entrance not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well-fortified, if watch be not kept."

"But soldiers, you always said, were great lovers," I pleaded, grasping for a straw, any straw.

"Soldiers are also great drunkards. To be given to lovemaking is no recommendation of a person." He paused. "Remember: Speaking in perpetual hyperbole may be attractive in Love, but it is not attractive in anything else."

I put my elbows on the knees of my camouflage pants, and held my head. "So what are you trying to make me do -- what do you want to say to me?" I moaned.

He leaned over to the table, to my plate of bread, and flicked off a scurrying cockroach. "Knock it off," he suggested.

It was only after he'd left, and the guard clanged the door to, that I stuck my face up to the bars and yelled, "No! I won't!"...

"Maybe later I will," I mumbled. "It all depends." The guard came to take away my dishes. He pointed to the corner of my cot and told me to secure my M-16 properly.

"Don't lean it against the wall, lay it flat," he said.

"Thanks, I will."

..........

When I step out into the prison exercise yard, there is instruction going on: soldiers are teaching the prisoners to suppress their bodily moisture, to survive better in the desert. It is the same training the soldiers had before they went to the Persian Gulf in 1991. I remember. There was a large dinner party before the soldiers left because they were very young, and very loved. Everything was draped and festooned in white, so it had the sentimental air of a christening. The table… was odd; it wasn’t a table at all: It was formed of ninety thousand white birds who’d gathered together on some sort of frame; they’d extended their wings, lowered their heads, and stood huddled together so closely that their backs and wings made a compact, feathered, level surface. (Out of what weird aviary kindness did they do this? What condescension?) These were living birds, so there was occasionally some movement, a quickening that fluttered across that surface every so often; and I was aware of a humming beneath it – I knew if I touched that surface I’d feel the beating of all their hearts. The young people, they sat around it, lifted and replaced wine they drank out of long thin crystal glasses; you can just imagine how beautiful the reflections were that glittered in the crystal sitting among the feathers, but these young people behaved as if dining off the backs of birds were an ordinary experience. A couple of them were playing games, flipping their forks at each other across the table; I saw the silver flash. They occasionally spilled crumbs and bits of food on the birds, who tried not to move. I know you are working and going on with everyday things and your existence is changing. I am as a sidebar and occasionally helpful and that is all. But when I think of you it feels like touching this table: I walk up with utter apprehension, and utter pleasure.

One soldier, slamming his weapon on the ground in frustration at his charges, yells at a prisoner who does not listen, but keeps breathing through his mouth. “You’ll learn to nose-breathe, maggot! You should be training in the desert in Las Vegas! Las Vegas -- where they build monuments to impermanence!”

Soon, I will call you to me and there won't be anything impermanent about it.

………………

I revisited the moon because the astronauts were planning to return; I was hoping to get there first in order to welcome them properly. It is only in places like the moon that we can suspend our disbelief for a while, it’s the location from which I sit now telling you things. In serious voices here we like to say things like: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust it. We control the vertical – we control the horizontal.”

The moon smells like gunpowder; this is something the Apollo 11 men discovered upon reentering their capsule and noticing an odd scent to the dust clinging to their boots. Gray dust. A memorializing ash left by violent aeons of rocks flying across the void to smash into this poor rock, this moon. Leaving it a waste, an old nuclear playground. I imagine it all was a strange disappointment to Buzz Aldrin, peering through his window as the capsule, coming closer and closer to the surface, still hung upside down over the moon like a bat. “Dust,” he’d whisper to himself, not wishing to be heard by his companion or his keepers in Houston. (Ashes to ashes, dust to) “Dust. And what did I want to find?” he’d weep. “Magic?”

(yes)

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